Ernst Herbeck's Gazelles

I learned about the schizophrenic Austrian poet Ernst Herbeck from W. G. Sebald's essay collection Campo Santo, then discovered that Gary Sullivan maintains a blog devoted to translating Herbeck.

Herbeck spent forty years in a mental hospital in lower Austria. The story goes that his psychologist, the writer Leo Navratil, would give him a blank postcard, a pen, and a title/topic, and Herbeck would proceed to write a poem, which he never subsequently revised. Here is Herbeck's poem “Poetry,” in Gary Sullivan's translation, courtesy of Fascicle:

"Poetry is an oral form of making history in slow motion. Poetry is a literary work. The teacher taught us in school that poetry is sealed. Poetry hates reality more difficult than itself. The poem is a transference of authority to the reader. The reader picks up the poem & that's history in the trees. Poetry teaches you from the animal out, to find it in the wild. How gazelles are reputable historiographers."

Sebald's essay in Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell, includes a partial rendering of the same poem:

"Poetry is an oral way of shaping history in slow motion... Poetry is also antipathetic to reality, and weighs more heavily. Poetry transfers authority to the pupil. The pupil learns poetry; and that is the history in the book. We learn poetry from the animal in the woods. Gazelles are famous historians."

One thing this seems to show is that you can be pretty crazy and still understand what poetry is.

It's also striking how different these two translations are. Are gazelles famous historians or reputable historiographers? Here is Gary Sullivan reading Herbeck translations on Youtube. The Notwist was also impacted by Herbeck.

The Problem of too Many Choices

Jonah Lehrer blogs here about why people are turned off by having too many choices, with reference to work by Sheena Iyengar.

I once heard a man at a science fiction conference say that, back when he started reading science fiction -- maybe in the 1940s or so -- a person could say to another person, “I like science fiction,” and get the reply, “I like science fiction too,” and those two people would know they were talking about the same books. But eventually that ceased to be true: it reached the point that two voracious science fiction readers might easily not have read any of the same authors. There should be a term for the moment in the history of a literary movement when this threshold is crossed...

Samuel R. Delany, in the introduction to his essay collection About Writing, uses the example of Romantic poetry in English -- "Though it may take a decade or more of reading, a single reader can be familiar with the totality of that field." Delany makes a persuasive case that there are exponentially more major poets writing in English today than there were in 1814 -- we should expect this, given that there are exponentially more people now who can read and write English than there were then -- and that it's therefore impossible now for anyone to have read all the major poets writing in English today. Delany concludes, "Thus, the doling out by the literate readership of fame, merit, or even simple attention is an entirely different process from what it once was."

Iyengar's work suggests that, when there are this many choices, consumers stop behaving rationally. Making a rational choice simply becomes too time-consuming. If there are too many good books to read already, that creates a dilemma for those of us whose life's ambition is to write more good books -- to the extent that we succeed in our ambition, we're only making this particular problem worse.

Stephen Elliott Uses the F Word

Free, that is -- here's something Stephen Elliott posted this week about writing for free.

Elliott -- "I think it's worth pointing out that people have always written for free for literary publications, or close enough to free that there's not really a difference. If you spend months on a short story, say six months on three short stories, and one of them gets picked up by McSweeney's and they give you $500, you're basically writing for free anyway. And if you're publishing in The Alaska Quarterly, or Zyzzyva, you're getting $50, or nothing."

On the face of it, placing stories in magazines only makes economic sense as a step towards publishing short story collections -- but short story collections are in any case unlikely to make money... yet even if we aren't in it for the money, we writers still think that what we do is worth money...

Elliott -- "I went through a period of publishing for free, and then a period of being insulted that people wanted my work for free, and then back into a period of writing for free. And then I started The Rumpus. But that middle part, where you think people owe you something for your art, is very uncomfortable... You're supposed to get paid for writing what other people want you to write, for being able to plug in and push out content, for widgeting. To only write what you want is a luxury."

The explosion of free content that is the Internet has us all bewildered... we still half-suspect that if it's free it can't be good. We experience a lot of cognitive dissonance about this. What use would Poe have made of the Internet, given the chance? What use if any would Kafka have made? Is the writing I do for free a brilliant-or-perhaps-stupid way of promoting the writing I'm trying to sell? Or is it a way of transcending the capitalist system in my last few months before becoming homeless? And is blogging a luxury or a form of slavery?

Shklovsky and the Footman

Newsflash: I'll be reading tonight at the Babble-On Reading series on Thursday June 25th, 8pm at Dog Eared Books at 900 Valencia @ 20th Street, along with Vauhini Vara and Rose Tully.

And now a Viktor Shklovsky quote I found, courtesy of Aqueduct Press, for that segment of my readership who can never enough Shklovsky -- you know who you are.

"Thackeray resented the idea of dénouement. He compared it with the residue of tea on the bottom of a cup; it's too sugary. It's obvious to the reader that it is a condensation of unresolved conflicts."

"To humor himself, Thackeray wanted his footman to write the ending for him, after he was done cleaning his boots and dress."

I approve of this simile, but it makes me want to defend dénouement . Because I think I want to taste those over-saccharine last dregs, with their nonetheless-bitter aftertaste. That final gulp, that ultimate page, bring a presentiment of death, for isn't it always the footman who writes the ending? Cf. J. Alfred Prufrock --

"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker...”

Shklovsky continues, "So then it appears that dénouements are based on the premise that they don't really exist."

This makes me think of Slavoj Žižek on "The Truman Show" -- "what if it is precisely this "happy" dénouement of the film... with the hero breaking out and, as we are led to believe, soon to join his true love... that is ideology at its purest? What if ideology resides in the very belief that, outside the closure of the finite universe, there is some 'true reality' to be entered?"

Could this be the residue we are straining to get a taste of at the bottom of the teacup? And remember that not all of us put sugar in our tea.

Trends in Male-Female Novelistic Dominance

When I read a work of fiction, I'm far more conscious of whether the author is a man or a woman than I am when I read a work of non-fiction.

It's not that the main character in a novel is necessarily the same sex as the author – but one always know what sex the main character is. I can think of novels, by Philip Roth and by Andrew Sean Greer for example, where one doesn't find out what race the main character is right away -- but it's hard to think of a novel where one doesn't learn immediately if the protagonist is male or female.

And isn't the way one identifies with a female protagonist created by a male author subtly different than the way one identifies with a female protagonist created by a woman author?

I learned recently, from Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees, that there have been many shifting trends in whether more men or women novelists are getting published. Far more men than women published novels from 1750 to 1780. But women novelists were in the majority from the 1780s until 1820. Then men dominated the field again from 1820 until the mid-nineteenth century, and women from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1870s, when the male novel became ascendant again... Moretti sees these cycles as playing a crucial role in keeping the novel a vital art form.

It seems unlikely there are any such trends for nonfiction? Possibly this is because we use so more of who we really are -- delve so much deeper into our souls -- when we write fiction than when we write nonfiction?

Helping Me Help Myself, by Beth Lisick

The premise of this book is that Beth Lisick devotes a year to trying to following the advice of various self-help writers. She attends seminars by Stephen Covey, John Gray, Suze Orman, and Deepak Chopra, and even goes on a cruise with Richard Simmons -- perhaps rather too easy a target for her.

While Lisick claims to be interested in improving herself, her interest never seems very genuine – it's more as if she had a funny idea for a book proposal, then had to follow though on it. It comes across that globe-trotting gurus who dispense expensive self-help advice emanate a certain degree of cheesy phoniness. I believe Lisick attempted to learn something from them, but largely failed. Did she try hard enough? If not, was it because, like the light-bulb in the psychiatrist joke, she didn't really want to change? I personally can't understand why she'd want to -- Beth Lisick, among other things a coorganizer of the Porchlight reading series, is much more of a role model to me personally than any of the self-help swamis she skewers.

After reading Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, Lisick decides it's less a book about how to be an artist than a book about how to feel like an artist without actually doing any art. This could be the problem with a lot of books in this category -- they're designed to help you feel successful, which may be counter-productive.

Henry Moore -- “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Irrelevant factoid, courtesy of Liam Passmore: it was on this day in 1868 that the typewriter was patented, by Christopher Sholes in Milwaukee.

Reflections on Samuel R. Delany's Dark Reflections

A Delany novel whose hero isn't having any sex – now that's a new development.

Arnold Hawley is a gay black poet. Although sexual opportunities come his way, Hawley allows his desires to remain largely unconsummated. Portraying a mostly closeted and celibate life feels like one of the vaster imaginative leaps Delany has taken, vaster than than the creation of any number of fantastic realms or flying monsters.

The first part of Dark Reflections (2007) is set in Arnold Hawley's old age, the second part in his middle years, the third part in his youth. This device feels eminently justified. I will speculate that this is because the events of youth only make sense from the perspective of later life? (If then.) In any case, now that I've read Dark Reflections, Delany's seems to me the most natural way to structure a bildungsroman.

Part Two I found especially powerful -- it is the story, which Delany makes wholly believable, of a gay black man's brief marriage to an insane and suicidal white woman.

I will note parenthetically that The Motion of Light in Water (1988), which deals among other things with the history of Delany's marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker, contains some of the best ever writing on the subject of marriage.

Delany does not specialize in Realism, but there aren't a lot of people out there who do it better.

Surely Hawley has to be a poet – the idea of a celibate poet feels somehow apposite? I doubt it would work as well if Delany had made Hawley a celibate science fiction writer... but I don't know why.

"The homeless man shifted. His face twitched.”

"Arnold opened his notebook and wrote four, five, six words...”

"Three barriers sever us, fellow: your language, your poverty, your insanity. Now and again, I've stepped to the far side of all three. Then Arnold realized: here was his poem. Aristotle had said that great art had to be about kings and generals and people of power. Well, it could also be about the homeless – even the twitch in the face of a homeless man, asleep on a bench in November.”

One of the joys of reading is getting to re-encounter a deeply likable sensibility – this entirely subjective quality is a huge part of what makes a book unputdownable. Delany is never less than joyfully illuminating. He continues to break new ground, and the rhythms of his prose are as urgent as ever.

The Future of Publishing and Ransom Stephens's The God Patent

Ransom Stephens has a new article up on OpenDemocracy about the future of publishing, predicting how Long Tail economics will play out in practice. Drawing analogies with the transition to digital media in other industries, he argues that “the revolution will not be led by an established publisher.”

True to his own theory, Ransom Stephens has chosen to publish his novel The God Patent on scribd.com. It's the story of a laid-off engineer, Ryan McNear, who has lost custody of his son, and is advised by a Constable to get the hell out of Texas.

Ryan muses, “The two relevant things to keep in mind when you run away are, first, you have to choose a direction and, second, since you can’t run away from your problems, you might as well run toward their solutions.”

Ryan makes it to Petaluma, California -- but his problems don't stop coming. He moves in with a a weaselly lawyer-landlord and a child prodigy, but when some joke patents taken out with one of his former colleagues are acquired by an Evangelical university, Ryan’s Texan past catches up with him, and he gets embroiled in a battle between Science and Religion over the origins of the universe and the existence of the soul.

The God Patent -- a wry, knowledgable story of heartbreak, cutting-edge scientific research, staying afloat in hard times while trying to steal a march on the system, and the eternal struggle between faith and reality -- takes us deep into the heart of contemporary America.

Scribd + InsideStorytime REVOLUTION

Tonight: InsideStorytime REVOLUTION, 6.30-8.30 pm at San Francisco's Cafe Royale -- an especially delightful venue as the summer solstice draws nigh. Have a drink and listen to a few good yarns in the radiant summer light. Tell us you learned about the event from this blog, and we'll waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge.

The hook tonight is that all our readers have books available on Scribd. (You pronounce it to rhyme with "ad libbed.") Joe Quirk explains the thinking here -- Scribd's new publishing model has the potential to advance the interests of both readers and writers. Perhaps it'll even turn out to be in the interests of publishing companies -- Simon & Schuster plan to make digital editions of about five thousand titles available for purchase on Scribd.

Increasing viral marketing into social networks is the name of the game -- bit of a paradigm shift, but then, until this week, I had my doubts about Twitter.

Reading tonight will be Tamim Ansary, Laura Shumaker, Kemble Scott, Joe Quirk, and InsideStorytime's very own Ransom Stephens -- whose thrilling novel The God Patent has been in the top five of Scribd's most read novels for two weeks and counting.

Alone Time

This passage from early on in Tamim Ansary's West of Kabul, East of New York has stayed with me a long time. Ansary is explaining how it felt to grow up in a traditional Afghan family:

"If I'm too much with other people, I need to balance it with some downtime. Most of the people I know are like this. We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts."

"My Afghan relatives achieved this same state by being with one another. Being at home with the group gave them the satisfactions we associate with solitude – ease, comfort, and the freedom to let down one's guard. The reason for this is hard to convey, but I'm going to try. Namely, our group self was just as real as our individual selves, perhaps more so."

This seemed a radical idea to me when I first read the book -- that there could be people for whom the state of togetherness was the "same state" that solitary downtime was for me. I've made many attempts to imagine that state.

Cultures and individuals vary in how much need is felt for solitary versus communal/ familial downtime. A writer, clearly, is always going to be someone who needs a vast amount of solitary downtime: I feel most frustrated when mine is impinged upon, when it's been too long since I could last hear my thoughts. That's part of why a day performing data entry in a cubicle can sometimes be less stressful than a familial voyage to a place of recreation. And that's part of why I'm not at a demonstration right now -- although perhaps I would be if I believed that demonstrations in the Bay Area had any influence at all on events elsewhere.

Will those closest to me remember me as someone who was always fretting about needing more alone time?

New Works by Tamim Ansary

Few have done more than Tamim Ansary to make the San Francisco literary community a community – as opposed to just an assortment of individuals who have writing propensities. My interview with the facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop just went up at Identity Theory.

He has a couple of new works out. One is Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Westerners have an idea of history in their heads – this book is designed to help you understand the idea of history that Moslems have.

Also just out is Ansary's novel The Widow's Husband, available for download through scribd.com -- this powerful work is comparable to J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, except that you get the point of view of both sides in the conflict.

Ansary's memoir West of Kabul, East of New York was 2008's selection for the San Francisco One City One Book program. All these books will help you better understand what in Destiny Disrupted Ansary calls the "friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting," a friction that's sparking fresh conflagrations even as I write.

In 2001, Ansary posted an e-mail about 9/11 that "went viral," and was forwarded around the world. One off-the-cuff prediction he made in this e-mail was that a likely unintended side-effect of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan would be the radicalization of border areas of Pakistan. Here's a recent essay for Powells.com in which he talks about how that played out, and answers some of the questions I didn't have time to ask him in my interview. And here's Beverly Parayno's interview with Ansary for the Rumpus.

Iran and the Internet

It amazes me that things are still happening to make me think the Internet is more important than I already thought it was.

On Saturday I became aware significant things were happening in Iran, when I saw posts by Iranian-Americans who happen to be my Facebook friends, expressing horror at the failure of the U.S. TV networks to cover what was going on. Immediately I went to Andrew Sullivan's blog and got up to speed -- in times of crisis, one suddenly realizes which news sources one actually trusts. Juan Cole's blog also delivered -- these were sites I hadn't even visited that recently, but they were the first places I went to for analysis of the crisis, and they didn't disappoint. My Iranian-American Facebook friends posted other helpful links.

When I talked on the phone to people who happened to be spending the weekend offline, they seemed completely uninformed about what was happening. Many thought the official election results put out by Ahmadinejad's supporters were the real results, and had no idea there was fighting in Tehran. Some of the political bloggers themselves seemed astonished at how bad a job the mainstream media were doing.

Does the Literary World Have a lot of Rules?

Beth Lisick tells a story in her book Helping Me Help Myself -- I'll quote the version of the same story that's currently on her website --

"Jennifer [Joseph] was invited to a writing conference in Birmingham that she couldn't attend because she was very pregnant. She sent me in her place, along with poets Jeff McDaniel and Bucky Sinister, both of whom had new books on Manic D. While we were there, Jeff, Bucky, and I did a reading at a cocktail party that had some fancy writers and publishers in attendance. After we read, James Tate told me he really liked one of my poems. He had just been asked to edit the Best American Poetry anthology and was wondering if my poem had been published. (I guess to be in those books, the piece has to be previously published somewhere.) Anyway, Clockwatch Review editor James Plath was standing there, and said he was about to go to press with his new issue. Plath said he would publish it and Tate could pull it from Clockwatch for the anthology."

"I didn't even consider myself a writer at the time, but when James Tate called my thing a poem and put it in a book called Best American Poetry, making this my first ever published piece of writing, I realized that there were obviously not a lot of rules in this literary world."

You can find Best American Poetry 1997 here, on Google Books, and go to page 134 to find Beth Lisick's poem. Some perspective -- Donnell Alexander's article on whether black people are cool, in the last issue of Might, also from 1997, specifically gives Beth Lisick as an example of a cool white person. So you don't have to take my word for it that she has more social skills than the average writer. Otherwise, maybe she wouldn't have found herself at that cocktail party to begin with. And her live readings are great -- found in a slushpile, would this poem have had the same impact?

For most writers, of course, the experience of getting published is more like the experience of Kafka's man from the country who seeks to gain entry into the law. But Beth Lisick would probably have gotten past that gatekeeper. Some people just are that way. Which is kind of cool I guess.

A Diagonal of Shocking Decline

Remember this, from the plane trip to America in The Information by Martin Amis?

"... Richard looked to see what everyone was reading, and found that his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't that the businessmen and businesswomen were immersing themselves in incorrigibly minor or incautiously canonized figures like Thornton Wilder or Dostoevsky, or with lightweight literary middlemen like A. L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil, or yet with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver. They were reading trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers: escape from the pressures facing the contemporary entrepreneur. And then he pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class, among all its drugged tycoons, and the few books lying unregarded on softly swelling stomachs were jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon. They all lay there flattened out in the digestive torpor of midafternoon, and nobody was reading anything -- except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde?"

Ignoring the dig at Dostoevsky -- the rule "do not attempt to decanonize Dostoevsky in a snarky aside" must be in Strunk and White somewhere -- this is a clever way to get Richard, the literary novelist who can only afford a cheap seat, to the other end of the plane, where sits his nemesis Gwyn, the bad commercial novelist. What Amis describes here is indeed the sort of thing Richard might notice along the way -- and it's also funny because Amis labors things we already know, such as that the businessmen aren't reading A. L. Rowse.

Also, it rings true -- the culture of the business world is anti-intellectual. Perhaps for good reason. If the "lone seeker" has a multi-million-dollar deal to close in the next twenty four hours, might a thriller not be more conducive than Thornton Wilder to attaining the required frame of mind?

Ten Thousand Hours, The Beatles, John Crowley

There's experimental evidence -- summarized here by K. Anders Ericsson, an expert in this field -- that virtuosity in playing a musical instrument has less to do with innate talent than with the number of hours of practice put in. This topic's been featured heavily in some popular books recently, including Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

Ericsson -- "the critical difference between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists. More generally, the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians... chessplayers... athletes..."

Gladwell goes to town with the 10,000 hours idea, claiming for example that the Beatles were so good because they played for 10,000 hours in Hamburg before they became famous. But he fails to ask what exactly the Beatles were good at -- it's not that they were the greatest guitar virtuosos of their time, or that Ringo was the greatest drummer. Virtuosity in playing one's instrument is simply not as important in popular music as it is in classical music.

Nor were the Beatles the greatest singers of their time. Perhaps they were the greatest popular songwriters? But their songwriting isn't what they spent 10,000 hours practicing in Hamburg. Maybe part of what they were so great at was precisely playing together, as a band? But how much of their success was due to their being good-looking, or just the right amount of cool/edgy, or to their music being just different enough from the rock music that was already popular, or to other attributes that 10,000 hours wouldn't have done much to enhance? How does the 10,000 hours theory explain the not-especially-distinguished solo careers of certain ex-Beatles?

I don't think the 10,000 hours idea is much help for explaining which popular musicians are successful.

Are writers more like classical musicians, in this respect, or more like popular musicians? John Crowley is a great writer, someone you'd think would know, and he doesn't entirely buy the 10,000 hours idea for writers.

"I tell the most talented writers I talk to to remember that if they stop now, don't write another word or think about writing for the next five years, they will be better writers at the end of those five years than they are now."

Maybe there are elements of writing you get better at with practice -- the craft aspects, the ability to ride your unconscious like a bronco, that sort of thing -- and other elements where the five year hiatus would actually be a help? What might those other elements be? Unfortunately I suspect it'd be physically impossible for me not to think about writing for five years -- perhaps even for five hours -- so I may never find out...

Fiction and Cannibalism

A passage from Beth Conklin's Consuming Grief, about funerary cannibalism among the Wari', an Amazonian tribe --

"Wari' emphasize that when they used to destroy corpses by eating or burning them, this had the same purpose as burning the house and other acts of destruction aimed at eliminating things that remind mourners of lost relatives. Elders have been bemused and at times rather irritated by anthropologists' apparent obsession with the subject of eating human flesh. 'Why are you always asking about eating the ones who died?' one man complained to me. 'You talk to me about eating; Denise [Meireles, a Brazilian ethnographer] came here and asked me about eating. The missionaries and the priests always used to say, “Why did you eat people? Why did you eat?” Eating, eating, eating! Eating was not all that we did! We cried, we sang, we burned the house, we burned all their things.' Pointing at the notebook in my lap, he directed, 'Write about all of this, not just the eating!'”

This man's frustration feels familiar. When I saw Peter Rock read from My Abandonment at Green Apple, he complained that people always ask him about the true story that inspired the novel – I confess, I did the same thing -- when that's just one of many elements integrated into My Abandonment. While it's okay to ask those kinds of questions, you won't understand the answers unless you ask other kinds of questions too.

The affinities between fiction writers and cannibals run deep -- ours is the art of cannibalizing reality, digesting it, and extracting anything it may contain in the way of nutritional value. We chew on and savor humanity, devouring so we can mourn. But this is not all that we do! Please see our anthrophagy in its proper context! We also cry, sing, and burn the house...

San Francisco, Declining Literary Region?

A few months back, I read Dana Gioia's essay, “Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region.” Republished in his 2004 essay collection Disappearing Ink, it was first published in the Fall 1998 Denver Quarterly, and can currently be read on Gioia's website.

Gioia argues that the San Francisco literary region was of far more importance at the beginning of the twentieth century than it was by the end. Of San Francisco in 1899, Gioia writes, “The literature of this Gold Rush seaport was innovative, irreverent, populist, and yet oddly international.” He praises Oakland poet Edwin Markham for his “populist and progressive but unillusioned view of existence.”

Unlike Gioia, I can't help perceiving similar qualities in the work I see coming out of the Bay Area today.

When Gioia writes, “A California writer is more likely to see local colleagues in a Manhattan publisher's office than near home,” he seems to me very wide of the mark. Admittedly I'm intensely involved in organizing literary events these days, so my experience may not be typical – yet encounters between local writers take place within my own visual field many times a week. I can't imagine these are a high percentage of the total number of such encounters taking place. Could it simply be that many of the writers Gioia knew in the late 1990s were deliberate recluses? Not that there's anything wrong with that -- I was reclusive myself in those days.

But the Bay Area is fortunate enough to have multiple literary events every day -- it's no exaggeration to say that. every week, there are several I feel guilty about not having time to attend, for example tonight's first monthly Rumpus at the Makeout Room, starting at 7pm, featuring Peter Orner, Andrew Sean Greer, and others.

"In California,” Gioia writes, “literary magazines almost inevitably become events – sometimes important ones – rather than ongoing enterprises.” Yet Zoetrope was founded in 1997, McSweeney's in 1998, Narrative in 2003 – all seem to me to be pretty tenacious institutions. And up in Portland, Tin House began in 1999. I struggle to explain the discrepancy between what Gioia sees and what I see. Has the West Coast experienced a literary renaissance in the years since 1998? Presumably this is not Gioia's opinion, since his 1998 essay currently appears on his website without any emendations.

Are Gioia's remarks perhaps truer for poetry than for prose?

A third explanation may have to do with Gioia's fixation on New York. New York's international cultural importance increased vastly over the course of the twentieth century -- so even if San Francisco hasn't declined in absolute cultural importance, it probably has declined relative to New York. This relates to another point Gioia makes:

"San Francisco still produces literature, but it no longer exports much literary opinion."

As Gioia says, Californians are more disposed to be creative than to be critical. We generate a lot of culture, while outsourcing the problem of deciding what's any good. The gatekeepers are elsewhere – although I've referred, in the course of this post, to some new institutions that may be helping to remedy this – and on balance we're okay with this.

"But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.” -- Anton Ego in the movie “Ratatouille”

Originality

"Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.” – Khakheperresenb.

Ironically these words by an Egyptian scribe, on a papyrus dated from around 2000 BC, are one of the earliest surviving texts we have.

For that matter, the story of Gilgamesh was already a millennium old by the time the "standard version," the text known to us, was carved onto clay tablets. And you thought Batman had been done to death...

My daughter's favorite author right now is Edward Eager, a man who wrote his children's books in unashamed imitation of E. Nesbit's. Just so you know what I mean by “unashamed,” the first in the series starts with a group of children sitting around glumly – they've just finished reading E. Nesbit, and are wondering why they never get to make magic wishes that come true... then suddenly they do...

As a small boy I commenced writing a novel utterly indebted to Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga; a few years later, I started writing a book equally derivative of P.G. Wodehouse -- by far my favorite author when I was thirteen. These manuscripts never got past the first few chapters. Wouldn't there be something beautiful, though, about basking in another writer's glory in this way, inhabiting another's universe for one's whole career?

My daughter got some E. Nesbit books for her birthday, and curiously, she now tells me that, on a scale of 1 to 10, she ranks E. Nesbit as a 7 -- she ranks J.K. Rowling as a 7 too -- but she ranks Edward Eager as a 10. Maybe just because his kids talk American? Maybe because she discovered him before she discovered E. Nesbit?

“It's not who does it first, it's who does it second.” -- I think David Bowie said this in an interview once.

Critique Group Protocols

In his novel Straight Man, Richard Russo makes some amusing comments about writing workshops:

"The first rule is that all comments and criticisms are to be directed at the manuscript and not its author. In return for this consideration, the author is not permitted to speak in defense of the manuscript."

"These are excellent, though fundamentally flawed, rules, The problem with the first is that what's wrong with any given manuscript is often easily located in the personality or character of its author, as is the case with Leo's story..."

There is indeed a sense in which one can't critique Leo's story without simultaneously critiquing Leo's character. Such critique sessions can be reminiscent of the struggle for survival among a pack of wolves. And the things that are wrong with your personality -- the things, that is, that doom you as a wolf -- may be among the most interesting things about your writing anyway... which doesn't mean you aren't doomed.

Wallace Stevens -- "Personally, I like words to sound wrong."

My theory about the second rule is that it's actually there for the author's defense. In writing groups that disregard the second rule, and permit authors to defend what they wrote, the initial criticisms may have to be rephrased more and more emphatically, resulting in a mauling. Better for the author whose work is under discussion to smile mysteriously and even nod. "If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too..."

Elves and Critics

There are different versions of this anecdote, which I first encountered in A.N. Wilson's biography of C.S. Lewis. But the basic story is that Hugh Dyson, one of the Inklings -- the writing group that also included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien -- had a tendency to recline during Tolkien's readings while uttering comments like "Oh Christ, not another fucking elf!"

It is for this contribution to the field of Tolkien criticism that Dyson is now chiefly remembered. One can sympathise with Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings was recently voted the most popular book ever by some British newspaper -- was Tolkien not unfortunate, then, to encounter someone like Dyson among his earliest readers?

Yet I can sympathise with Dyson too -- there are some among us for whom a little elf goes a long way. And I would argue that, while "O.C.N.A.F.E!" does not sound much like constructive criticism, we can't be sure Dyson's remarks were useless to Tolkien. This is pure speculation, but conceivably Tolkien's early drafts were especially elf-ridden, and Dyson inspired him to use a little more restraint, helping him to make his final version more widely accessible. For even when critics pelt you with excrement, there may be seeds of truth therein.

In this interpretation, elves might represent whatever is excessive in a writer's early drafts -- whimsical and precious elements that have to be pruned, those minor characters who turn out to be surplus to requirements, or the kind of writing Dr. Johnson was thinking of when he advised, "Read over your compositions, and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but if Dyson had said, "Excellent work, the central conflict of our times imagined in a form resplendent with echoes of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic literature, although I do find some of the elvish characters a tad tricky to distinguish from one another," would Tolkien even have heard the last part? Perhaps sometimes one has to say "O.C.N.A.F.E!" to get one's point across?

"Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic." -- Jean Sibelius. Although actually Alex Ross has noted at least three cases of statues being put up to critics.

Huge Novels That Take Place in Madagascar

I've seen a lot of claims that the Internet has made American fiction more attention-grabbing, superficial, hip, snarky, and so on, so I was interested to see this alternative perspective in a recent Ethan Canin interview.

"The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way. During the last 10 years, the young writers I teach have gone from writing small stories set in strip malls, which was the Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver influence, to huge novels that take place in Madagascar. They can just look up all kinds of information and photography on the Web."

Curiouser and curiouser. Before the Internet, the research tools needed to write huge novels set in exotic places were already available to anyone with access to a university library. But there are certainly fiction research tasks the Internet's especially useful for -- if you want to know what the daily life of, say, a strip mall employee or a lion tamer feels like, you'll probably be able to find a few dozen blogs dripping with salient details you couldn't have made up.

Anyways, any tendency in literature can be relied on to provoke a vigorous counter-tendency, and I was quoting Canin mostly so I can segue into plugging tonight's Cocktails with Canin event, a fundraiser for Litquake. This will be an on-stage conversation with Ethan Canin, and there will be cocktails. Broadway Studios, 435 Broadway, San Francisco. Tuesday, June 2nd. $55 for the VIP Reception starting at 6 pm. $15 for the 8 pm. program.

Another thing -- in the interview I linked to, Canin talks about Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger -- I just wanted to add that this is one of my favorite books too.

Thoughts on Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero

First, I like it about Ondaatje that his books are all completely different from each other.

Divisadero is a classic case of a "French novel in English" -- on many levels it feels more like a French novel than an English one. Early on, Ondaatje says of mid-twentieth-century Northern California that, "It was as if there were a novella by Balzac round every bend," and so it turns out.

This book's written in the sort of poetic prose that only poets can write. (Non-poets can write poetic prose too, but that's different -- Divisadero is written in sound, disciplined prose that you can nonetheless feel constantly yearning to become poetry.)

The first two thirds of Divisadero feel to me like a rare case of a novel where each chapter has the strengths of a short story, even though, cumulatively, the chapters combine to achieve the virtues of a novel. This part of the book's set in twentieth-century California and Nevada, but through plot and imagery Ondaatje keeps one foot in the pre-modern -- nothing happens that couldn't just as well have happened in fin-de-siècle rural France. Reminders of the beauties and violences of pre-modernized society are constant throughout the book.

The last third of Divisadero shifts completely to fin-de-siècle rural France, leaving key characters in the lurch, the focus shifting to someone who previously seemed to be a minor character. As anyone who's written novels and gotten feedback on them might suspect, this throws certain readers -- David Wildman took this point up with Ondaatje in an interview, which contains some more plot information. Somehow the effect of the shift pretty much works for me though. (I know "somehow" is not a very satisfying explanation, and if I come up with a better one, I'll come back and add more comments.)

"Succinct histories tell us something -- that anything peaceful has a troubled past." -- Divisadero